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LulzSec Reborn? Military dating data dump may be work of reformed group

By 1105 Media Staff

Mar 29, 2012

Love was not in the air -- or in cyberspace for that matter -- March 25, when a hackers exposed the information of thousands of users of a military dating website, or at least claimed to.

A group calling itself "LulzSec Reborn" released usernames and passwords of 170,937 subscribers to the online military dating service MilitarySingles.com, publicizing the information and citing Microsoft domains among the military ones. However, whether the information is valid remains to be seen.

"The website http://www.militarysingles.com/ was recently closed day ago or so, so we dumped email db," said the group in a Pastebin post. "There are emails such as @us.army.mil ; @carney.navy.mil ; @greatlakes.cnet.navy.mil ; @microsoft.com ; etc."

In the wake of the attack, Robert Goebel, CEO of ESingles Inc., said that the company, which runs MilitarySingles.com, is looking for ways to increase its security. "We have enacted a series of security procedures in response," said Goebel to the Los Angeles Times. "Regardless of whether it was a true claim or false claim, we're treating it as though it's true just to be safe."

Goebel said he believes that there was no hack involved with LulzSec Reborn's information dump. The site was down for some time over the weekend, but that was due to scheduled maintenance, he said. Goebel also believes the validity of the info dump is not accurate as MilitarySingles.com only has 140,000 members.

"It's probably [LulzSec Reborn] trying to make a name for themselves or something," Goebel said. "Just because we have the name 'military' in it, that might be why they decided to claim they went after us."

Commenting on the purpose for the apparent return of the LulzSec hacker group, an anonymous member claiming to be a part of the collective told the following to Softpedia: "[We want to] continue where old LulzSec stopped, to hack military and government sites and leak their databases full of sensitive information to the public," said a LulzSec member. "We also want to avenge the ones that were arrested, besides Sabu because we blame him for everything. We all worked with him and we were blind to see that he was a snitch."

Five members suspected of being part of the original LulzSec group were arrested last month based on information provided to the FBI by the group's leader, who went by the name of "Sabu."

The March 25 data dump looks to be the first action taken by a group under the LulzSec moniker since its 50-day campaign of hacks and leaks ended last summer.

According to the Softpedia article, the new team was formed in February and contains 10 to 20 full-time members -- many of which worked with the original LulzSec hacker group.